NCC deadline

• Streamlining the subscriber base of mobile phone networks for integrity and safety is a necessary step that should proceed with caution

About three years after the take-off of the National Subscriber Identity Module card registration, owners of unregistered telephone lines have been warned to register their lines or be cut off from the telecommunications networks across the country. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), which gave the warning, said with effect from June 30, any unregistered telephone subscriber would not be able to make phone calls or send text messages on such lines. The commission’s director of public affairs, Mr. Tony Ojobo, who made this known, said the decision was part of the outcome of a meeting between the telecommunications operators and the regulatory agency.

When the Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication was launched in the country in August 2001, all that subscribers needed to do was approach a dealer for line and this was activated about 24 hours later. Nobody cared about registration of the lines. However, with the upsurge in crimes, particularly kidnapping and terrorism, the government thought it expedient to have telephone subscribers registered, at least to enable it pin particular numbers to specific persons, to checkmate the criminals who took undue advantage of the haphazard manner that characterised the ownership of the lines then.

To demonstrate its commitment to the registration exercise, the Federal Government provided N6billion to the NCC to facilitate the implementation of the project, against strident criticisms that the registration should have been the sole responsibility of the telephone operators.

At least 80 percent success was reportedly recorded at the end of the first phase of the exercise, with about 95,886,714 subscribers registered. The implication is that at most, about 19.16 million mobile telephone subscribers across the country may be disconnected from their respective networks next month, if they have still not registered their lines. Even though the subscriber base has since increased to more than 109,829,223 as of December 31, 2012, the new subscribers are unlikely to be affected by the June 30 deadline because their lines must have been registered before activation.

Since nothing lasts forever, the June 30 deadline given by the NCC is a fair deal; it is long enough for any genuine telephone subscriber to register his or her line. The need for a deadline for the registration is further exacerbated by the fact that the country has no reliable data base and part of government’s intention is to use the data garnered during the exercise as a form of data base from where basic information could be obtained about quite a significant number of Nigerians.

Without doubt, we need to know the exact number of telephone subscribers in the country. And this cannot be ascertained unless every line is registered and we can also not get this unless we put a deadline to the registration of old lines that had been in use before the registration started, since new lines are being registered before they are activated. The advantages of knowing these statistics far outweigh any disadvantage of the registration.

But the NCC and the telephone operators have to be systematic and take extra care so as not to cut off subscribers that have registered their lines. The possibility of this is high in view of the experience of many subscribers who have registered their lines but keep getting text messages to do same. What this implies is that data collated during the registration were not synchronised. Otherwise, it is only those that are yet to register that should receive such messages.

This is why we urge extreme care in cutting off lines even after the expiration of the deadline. Subscribers who are yet to register should seize the window of opportunity to register their lines before the deadline. However, we must remind the regulator and the telephone providers that registration of telephone lines should not be a ritual that law-abiding subscribers have to perform again and again simply because someone or some organisation failed to do their job.